I tend to be okay with “just talking” social RP if the characters involved are engaging enough. When I think of BaRP, I tend to think of more “primarily talking” social scenes. If that’s all I had access too would be sad after awhile though.

I think for some (maybe most?) people that may also include what I would count as more actiony type of social RP (playing a game/researching/building something) but I think that’s because I kind of like rolling dice too. I would put using abilities or little one-shot exploration stuff that isn’t really GMed and isn’t tied to a metaplot thing as mostly social too. But I can be perfectly happy with that for a long time. I’m not sure if that counts as slice of life (it certainly could, depending on the context!) or not. And then for some people dice rolling breaks immersion if it’s not important enough or it really stresses them out OOCly, or it is totally possible for someone to be a colossal showboating ass with dice rolls OOC too which isn’t super fun except to them).

Yammy, I agree with you about instant/live scene pacing, that’s been pretty consistent for the last 20+ years for me! I do notice perhaps that these days 10-15-20 can be usual for “live” unless the person organizing says something about keeping it to 15 or less. I wonder if that’s because there’s older brains working or something!

Async is so variable depending on game/r culture though, at least in my observation, that I now always ask what people intend the pacing to be. There are lots of people that do the 1 or a couple of poses per day thing. Some are like a pose every few days. For me personally I tend to mean every few hours, or a stop and then restart later in “live” mode, it’s just that it may be out of order with other game timestream stuff. I learned to ask because on one game in particular I was stuck in a huge group scene where the intent was a timely catchup but one person asked for async, I said fine because I was thinking everyone would pose a couple of times a day, but what ended up happening is that half the group reverted to posing 24 hours after the last pose, so in effect that was ONE pose in the entire SCENE per day and these were like normal live poses so like 2-4 sentences and I thought I was going to die. I’m not saying they were bad people, they weren’t. But I should have asked because I can’t handle that glacial of a pace, so that was totally on me for saying sure without asking.

I’ve been told my “style” of async may be more properly described as “distracted/work-friendly” so that’s what I’ve been calling it rather than async over the last few years.

I always appreciate when terms/pace is outlined specifically for that scene, because we all have different brains and assumptions so that seems to me to be the best way to cut down annoyance and increase engagement or to give people a friendly way to say “man thanks for your offer but that pace won’t work for me, I hope you guys have fun,” proactively before they’re feeling either totally overwhelmed or like they want to gnaw their own leg off to escape. I can’t do either end of the spectrum well (the instant OR the one pose in a scene per day/in a 4 person scene getting to do 1 pose every 4 days). My poor brain can only really keep things together for a bout a week regardless of pace, and for me the live/pause for up to 2 days/resume is better than the 4 day between posing stuff.

I would be willing to try the long delay novella RP pace though. I think that would work better for me and be okay than the : smiles and nods and says “How interesting, tell me more.” and having to wait 4 days to respond to it lol.

If I make it past the first 10 scenes on a game, I’m usually a lifer though I will have episodes of getting punched in the face by RL so there have been many times that things went down during that time or shortly after.

I can’t think of a time where I’ve been upset. Sometimes I’ve had a little epilogue dialog with players of PCs who were really close knit with mine, and that has been super fun and appreciated. But even if it doesn’t happen, that is fine too. I try to express my appreciation for staff even if I’ve been absent for most of the final months, because I always have such wonderful memories and enjoyment.

When I think about it broadly, most of time time staff has wandered off or lost steam before I did (or there was some massive staff explosion/implosion). Sometimes the game continues after that, most of the time it doesn’t. I’m glad that at least in the last handful of years, we seem to have moved on from people getting super mad and demanding and rude to staff when they close a game for whatever reason. I don’t necessarily think that it’s because nobody cares so much as perhaps they don’t get as worked up about it enough to be abusive to acquaintances? I hope, anyway.

@Yam Honestly, I wouldn’t for a stranger/unknown person. But if I knew it wouldn’t be more of a burden to the gamerunner/staff than a benefit, I would totally be willing to chip in monthly or whatever for a game.

I think though that it would be a burden to most folks who aren’t used to it. And I totally understand why some people wouldn’t. I love it when I get the opportunity to chip in for things though. And while I think (?) most people who know me would be willing to believe I did not expect special treatment or pressure them at all, I think that would be hard for many people to accept from strangers, and I wouldn’t want to cause someone more stress or see them have to deal with people who might say no pressure but would very much have expectations.

It’s hard for people even to maintain garden variety staffing boundaries/expectations, I think that only increase exponentially when money is involved.

I used to hate web-based CG, now I prefer it.

I was an application staffer on TR for a few years (for Mortal+ and changeling), but have staffed other smaller places too where I had to review some apps (TR burned me out bad though so I tend to avoid that particular task if I can).

My experience is that it’s not very useful for screening the worst kind of problematic people out. Abusive or manipulative people will almost always look fantastic on paper, you won’t find out about them until they’re hurting people on your game.

Player ooc behavior during the application process will catch more people. How do they handle being told no? How do they handle a mild wait time? How many arguments/how much showboating do they do on channels in the wait time?

It can also kind of alert you to the kinds of folks that probably won’t be problematic in a big way on the game, but will annoy people a lot because they don’t have discretion (like the folks who insert explicit and elaborate sexual content into the application bg knowing or perhaps not thinking that it’s making a real life staff person have to read that) or don’t understand the theme or splat. That may or may not be important to the game at large.

I have spent the longest time away from being active on a game than I ever have in like 30 years of being in the hobby! That isn’t to say I haven’t tried or dipped my toe in (and nothing happened to cause it, I did have fun where I dipped in!) Part of it is starting my dream job, but honestly I think some of it is that I take a med that is amazing (pretty much obliterated all my chronic illness stuff!) but now there’s an understanding that it affects satiety in a big way. I find I don’t crave the rush or busy-ness of a super active MUSH schedule, which filled a lot of that needing to keep my super bouncy mind active to be happy. I totally get being nostalgic for marathon RP and constant activity, it was one of those ways I kept my happiness meter charged for most of my adult life! Now I don’t need to do quite so many things to get that same nice feeling of contentment.

I do think if I found the right paced game that had the people I like in it, I might pick up again, but I’m also okay waiting for that too. I just find the last few places I’ve tried the pace was a little fast for me and I couldn’t keep up. The nice thing is that I wasn’t stressed out about that like I normally would fret at not being able to keep up.

So anyway. I do miss my RP partners, I’m glad I can see what people are up to here, and keep up with what’s going on so if I do wanna dip in I can. I’m sure I will at some point, but I’m also pretty sure it’s probably not going to be on a high stakes or fast paced game again!

I have seen a person get banned around constant loud complaints about asking for RP but they never accepted when people said yes. To me it was clear that they were really only interested in a few specific people, they would spam and handwring on chan when those folks were present and ignore everyone else’s invites or yeses on the lrp channel.

So it wasn’t so much a ban for asking for RP (even though thats the channel where they really were engaging in public problematic behavior) but being passive aggressive/obnoxious/extremely negative on channel.

I’m sure they are fine as a person but it was nice to not have to turn off the lrp channel and being able to use that resource again without having to also deal with their constant complaints that “nobody” would RP with then when in fact people had accepted but weren’t the intended targets of the public asking.

Usually when people act like that in public, they are equally if not more problematic 1:1 or in small groups so not an asset to the game. Maybe this person was an exception but I dunno, could never get them to accept any proactive offer of RP, they never responded to my acceptances of their public asks, and where they showed up to public scenes I or others would set up that their intended targets would come to they would go silent or stompy when that target interacted with others and it didn’t turn into a 1:1 sub scene.

I am almost positive that person’s perception was that they were banned for asking for RP too much. But that wasn’t the real issue of behavior and I doubt even if staff tried to make that clear that the person would have been open to understanding that.

@Hobbie yeah that sounds like a nightmare! There’s only so much you can do as a friend, and I think just about everyone would struggle having to deal with that, especially when it is a consistent pattern. Hopefully this will relieve a lot od stress in your life. I hope cutting out people who dont add much to your life but that level of stress ahd disappointment gives you a little more peace!

I do miss game meet ups in person! I’ve met some of my best and oldest rl friends that way, and we needed the in person meet ups because we annoyed each other on the games themselves until we met in person!

@Roadspike that is largely what I mean. If I dont think staff is able and willing to spot and remove people that don’t get it, that is where I dont bother investing/playing on that place because I know its going to go off the rails, no matter what language is used in policies/what the genuine intent is. I know many nice/creative folks who are great storytellers but suck at boundaries.

@Tez I dont think it is either, I enjoy those tensions, but personally I’d only want to give it a shot with gamerunners I trusted, both in how that would be managed and their quickness in excluding people with problematic behavior that crop up. (You are on the list of trusted gamerunners BTW but I think you already know that! <3)

I always find it disappointing when people can’t live without the historical -isms, even though I also don’t terribly mind if they’re in there to an extent and people who are clearly really leaning into getting their ooc freak on in regards to that are culled.

With most any game setting on a mush, you always have to narrow down the scope for the sanity of the staff and the health of the game as a whole. This is just part of that! Of course you will get the screamers of OMG I can’t be whatever splat/association I want putting pressure on game runners to do all nobility plus all guild availability on a fading suns game with 2 staff, or screaming for 15 splats on a WoD place when staff only have availability or interest for 1-3!

I’ve always told people I understand how exploring certain themes from the relative safety of RP is very appealing but that’s probably something better done in a private game or one that the playerbase is heavily vetted because on a public one, one with randos, or one with many “friends” of friends, you are increasing the likelihood of someone who has no business exploring those themes with others being able to come in. Maybe sometimes there’s staff willing to police it, and if there is and you like that avenue of play rather than whining you better treat them well, because most people don’t have time or patience for that.

@Hobbie I’ve managed to maintain adult friendships with people whose parenting choices wouldn’t be mine, but very importantly, it’s because we avoid long together times when the kids are involved. Most of the time we’ve had the elephant in the room discussion soon after the precipitating event, which has always been interesting (and one of the reasons why we were able to maintain the friendship). I personally have never regretted keeping a friendship in this manner (unless we couldn’t have that discussion, sans kids, but all of those times the friendship naturally fizzled).

I’m not going to say don’t go against your gut, but it might be worth thinking for a bit if you are willing to give the friendship a chance, chalk this up to not being a good vacation fit because they were more on edge with friends sharing a space (it happens), something’s going on between them that you don’t know about (it happens), or somesuch.

I’ve definitely had to draw boundaries with some friends who are also parents around what I will and won’t do with their kids at my house (or theirs) and the rules of engagement/courtesy at mine too (Like an agreement we all put the phones away/in phone jail, what areas are off limits, ect). I tend to be the more vigilant person at gatherings too just because I slip into early childhood educator mode, and I think some people naturally default to it. It definitely makes me thankful for the majority of friends in my life that are solid “aunties and uncles” to my kids, even if our day to day parenting styles aren’t in total alignment, I know they have oversight and are vigilant to keep everyone safe.

But yeah, there are a handful of folks where I have been, “You know, I enjoy doing X Y, or Z with you but I think we should do it without the kids,” too.

That being said i am sorry you are even having to consider this and that the vacation was ruined. It really sucks when people disappoint you like this. And it is totally better to just let them go sometimes too!

Shadowrun Seattle and some weird vague MOO that I’ve forgotten the name of. In 1994 or 1995 I think. Quickly followed by Twin Cities by Tea Time (the original). LOL.

I landed a dream job with excellent low cost bennies (yay state employment) and I’m still having fun and no stress! It was a hard decision to leave my old job as I loved the community there but it was getting too hard for me physically. But now even the worst day is less painful than the best day at my old job, and the worst day is pretty mellow. For now, it’s so nice to be able to breathe again, and have a normal level of stress. I also get to interact every day with 6 months old through seniors in high school, and seeing how much the big kids enjoy learning how to care for the littles is doing my heart a lot of good.

I’ve never seen this done successfully in a public game. Nor have I seen it last well in a game that turned from private to open invite.

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

I too am eager to hear of examples where it was able to last, especially post-open-invite or when the size grew to more medium+ sized MU instead of glorified table top or very small community.

Every once in awhile I miss being staff/ST on a WoD place but dealing with people like this reminds me why I actually do not.

RL is eating me alive. I sustained what I am no longer in denial about it being a career ending injury several months ago, still doing my best to soldier through my remaining settled contract hours all while jumping into the abyss of despair that is job searching right now (and starting over in roles that I dont have 30 years of experience in). Ugh.

@RedRocket I’ve seen genuine no holds barred games developed and run but the last few i personally know of were invite only. Mostly because the runners don’t want oocly tiresome or showboating folks or want to curate their players to people they reasonably can be confident wont take it personally when something doesn’t go the way they expect.

I’ve played a soft majority of pvp friendly games in my life and honestly sometimes dealing with a big chunk of the pb attracted to them is just very tiring. I am not sure why you say it is the non pvp folks who are the whiners. My god half the reason old school pvp stuff took so long was the incessant whining and rules layering of the people most into it. Usually I was hoping one of them would just please off my PC by the end of many of the encounters so I could escape and not have to read their words anymore. I have never heard stronger whining or tantrums than on a pvp focused game.

That isn’t to say all pvp friendly folks are whiners, because they are not. But if you are very sensitive to people whining probably the best place is one that doesn’t do ooc communication very much. Those are out there too. Or were.

@Pavel oh the glory days of days (or weeks) of being timestopped/frozen.